The development of a child is a gradual process which is marked in great part by the child's independent mastering of a given task formerly performed for her by an adult. This task mastering often evolves through a child's exhaustive trial and error while receiving assistance from adults. The rewards of such an accomplishment are two-fold, benefitting both the child and adults. The child develops a sense of pride, growing confident in her abilities. Moreover, an adult is freed from a task, which, though cute the first few times performed, may become probably exasperating due to its frequent repetition.
A common task which most every child eventually masters, and one which due to its redundancy proves tiresome for assisting adults, pertains to footwear or shoes. It is well accepted that young children are incapable of consistently putting their shoes on correctly without adult assistance. Typical problems for children include both lacing up their shoes and tieing the shoelaces as well as the seemingly simple task of placing the left and right shoes on their respective feet. The evolution of footwear wherein laces have been replaced with VELCRO straps, as well as the existence of slip-on footwear, has addressed the former problem which prevented children from independently putting on their shoes. Nonetheless, the latter problem remains unaddressed and unresolved.
Small children typically have difficulty properly orienting their shoes for wear as they are unable to distinguish between their left and right shoes. As a result, when dressing without adult supervision, a child often places her shoes on the opposite feet for which they are designed; a child simply revels in the fact that her shoes are on. However, the resulting adult intervention to correct the problem, and thereby prevent harm to the child's feet, not only is time consuming for an adult, but also undermines the child's self-esteem. At other times, children track down and interrupt adults to ask which foot goes in which shoe. Thus, even if a child possesses slip-on shoes or those footwear equipped with VELCRO straps, the assistance of an adult is still required to guarantee the shoes are properly worn.
Previous solutions to this shoe orientation problem, while not wholly inadequate, suffer from serious shortcomings. An adult can mark the shoes as left and right or "L" and "R". However, teaching a child to distinguish and interpret the meanings of these two letters is a task unto itself, and a distinction which a child will frequently forget as soon as the lesson has terminated. Alternatively, as a means of insuring proper wearing of footwear an adult can align a child's shoes in the proper left-right orientation and place then in her closet or any other location where shoes are normally situated. Nonetheless, these shoes will almost assuredly not remain in their proper orientation until and during their placement by a child on her feet.